We’re also, here in the U.S., beginning to see a increasing number of veterans returning from the last 11 years of war in the Middle East. Most are re-entering civilian life without problems, although we’re also reading about individual cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance abuse, domestic violence … pick your symptom.

The nature of the news media to tell these stories when they happen makes it seem as if we’re dealing with an epidemic of mental health problems. This isn’t to say we aren’t dealing with those problems, but they probably aren’t as near epidemic proportions as we hear. It’s analogous to how the news reports crime: you only hear about crime when it occurs, not when it doesn’t. You could live in a perfectly quiet neighborhood for years, but if one person gets killed (for whatever reason), the TV is full of people wringing their hands about an epidemic of violence and “You don’t know who to trust any more.” News reports focus on what stands out, not on what happens day after day without change.)

But aside from what issues veterans may or may not be dealing with as they re-enter civilian life, there’s been a bit of change in civilian life as well. Call it the “veteranization” of society. It’s most readily apparent at sporting events, where it’s obligatory to parade a few veterans in front of the crowd and publicly thank them for their service. Veterans often get called first for boarding on aircraft, along with first-class passengers, families with young children and people in wheelchairs. Politicians often need to express some sort of gratitude at any event in which someone shows up in uniform.

This is to be expected, and it’s also appropriate to a certain extent. Veterans are here among us, many have been put in horrible situations and asked to do horrible things so the rest of us don’t have to. Meeting someone in uniform, or being made aware that someone was recently in a combat zone, immediately tells us civilians that there’s really nothing we’ve done recently that compares to their experience, either individually or as a measurement of our worth to society. Our most significant contribution to the greater good might have been to land a new sales contract in Ohio, or save our company money in procurement costs, or, at best, helped raise money in a 10k walk to cure cancer.

Those aren’t bad things to have done, but it doesn’t compare with saving your platoon or routing a nest of Taliban fighters that had been slaughtering girls trying to go to school in Afghanistan. So there’s a bit of sheepish guilt involved when the initial reaction is to say “Thank you for your service.” What else can you say?

But it’s also something, as the New York Times pointed out recently, that can really grate against some veterans because it is, in fact, a cop-out, and they know it. We don’t understand what that veteran has gone through recently. Even if we’ve read about that individual’s exploits in the war zone, we weren’t there, faced with the unending and unbearable stress of knowing a single slip-up could mean getting yourself or your friends killed. Couple this knowledge with the fact that not all service members believe in what they’re doing equally. Some were gung-ho, true believers, like Chris Kyle of “American Sniper” fame/infamy, while others like Pat Tillman questioned the rationale for their being there, or the wisdom of those that decided to send them to war in the first place.

There is already a tendency to treat veterans as damaged goods in our society. Part of this stems from the post-Vietnam era, and may be a mixture of our perceptions of some cases of real PTSD and collective guilt for not rallying behind the war or not “supporting the troops” more than was the case.

(As an aside, I think it’s a bit lazy to consider the anti-Vietnam War movement as a product of excessive liberalism, or even “liberal” at all. Organized opposition certainly originated from the left, but the mass protest movement — well, a lot of those hippies turned into Reagan voters and didn’t utter a peep when we invaded Grenada and Panama and launched a proxy war in Nicaragua. Protesting a war you might get drafted to go and fight and die in is self-preservation, and that’s a rather easy cause to support, especially for the narcissistic Baby Boom generation. Why go get killed when you can stay in college, smoke a lot of dope and get a lot of sex under the guise of “free love”? The real liberals were marching in Birmingham and Selma, and facing down the National Guard and their fire hoses and dogs.)

If there’s anything we should have learned from the Vietnam era, it’s that catastrophes can happen if people are reflexively deferential to the powerful, who might have another agenda entirely. By 2003, we seem to have completely unlearned that lesson, and allowed our leaders to drag us into yet another war for dubious purposes: a war that is now entering its 12th year, longer than our time in Vietnam from the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the surrender of Saigon. (Although, technically, the war for us started in 1955, and for the Vietnamese is started during World War II as a movement to expel the colonial rule of France and Japanese military dominance of Southeast Asia.)

In 2015 we’re in a different situation, but there are some similarities. Our military is professional, not conscripted. Every service member chose to be there, knowing they might be called upon to sacrifice their lives, without question, on the orders of someone sitting at a desk thousands of miles away. Just signing up takes a bit of bravery, if you think about it (although not everyone who signs up is fully cognizant of the risks, especially during peacetime, when joining the military may be seen as more of a leg up into the middle class through the GI Bill.)

But there have been times when guilt has been deployed as an effective recruiting tool. “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” was a recruiting slogan used by the British and we had Uncle Sam telling us that he wanted us in the army. That was a time when winning a war required marshalling an entire population into the war effort, into the factories for women, into uniform for men. We haven’t required that level of national sacrifice for a long time, and some of us are quite aware of that when we encounter one of the 1.3 million or so active-duty personnel in our daily lives. They comprise less than one percent of the population, and yet they stand in for the rest of us in foreign wars. Saying “thank you for your service” is the least we can do, it seems, but it’s also the most many of us do. We’re not, for example, “sacrificing” more of our tax money to support programs to end homelessness, to provide more addiction treatment, more job placement and career transition services, and so forth. Some of those services exist, but they’re not everywhere, and they’re definitely not reaching everyone. (And, to get a little political here, it does seem that the one party that publicly aligns itself with aggressive military action is the same one that doesn’t hesitate to cut benefits for those veterans before it would ask the well-off to pony up a bit more to support them.)

More to the point, civilians don’t know what it’s like to be in a war zone, and that’s something active-duty personnel and veterans are acutely aware of. The cost of an all-professional military has been an increased distance from the larger civilian society. The rest of us don’t know what sacrifice during wartime means, and consider higher gas prices to be an unbearable burden.

There is no easy answer to this problem. But it starts with making civilians more aware of what our military does, and making our people in uniform more willing to tell their stories to the rest of us. Empty gestures of gratitude might be appreciated by some, but they don’t help break down the barriers that we’ve erected between the armed services and civilian life. Saying “support the troops” in recent history has taken on a political bent, and one toward quashing dissent rather than providing actual support. The meaning in the broader culture is unambiguous: It’s “Shut up and support the troops,” not “Support the troops with higher taxes to provide social services to returning veterans.”

There are still true believers, in uniform and out, who never questioned the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (I was adamantly opposed, for the record), or the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan (I was reluctantly in favor of it, to the extent that we succeeded in disrupting Al Qaida). There was talk a few years ago about launching military action against Syria (which didn’t have much public support from any quarter), and now we’re talking about escalating the war against the Islamic State, for which there seems to be more support, but it’s not a “hu-ah” chest thumping as much as a “eh-somebody’s-got-to-do-it-and-it-might-as-well-be-us.” (I will say this about George W. Bush: he did an incredible job of ginning up enthusiasm for a war that was absolutely the worst foreign policy mistake in a century, while Barack Obama has been abysmal at building support for a conflict that we have an obligation to see to its completion. “You broke it, you bought it,” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Smoke ’em out.”)

What needs to happen, regardless of whether or to what extent we go back into Iraq, is that we all need to understand more about what is happening with and to our service members. But it’s probably incumbent on our troops and vets to take the lead in telling their stories. No single story can capture the entirety of a war, and not all soldiers will want to talk about it. But when we start talking about supporting the troops again, we need to be doing it open-eyed, with the understanding that we might not like what we’re seeing. Only then, I think, can we be in a position to say “thank you.” The troops we’re thanking will at least know that this time we really mean it.

UPDATE (May 22, 2015)

After posting this, I went and asked a vet I know, my cousin David, who served in Vietnam in the Air Force. We’re probably political opposites (although I don’t know for sure, because like much of my somewhat diverse family, we tend to shy away from hot-button topics; we’re largely Scottish-Northern European mutts, but we fight like Italians when we get going). But I asked his opinion of this, since he’s active in the local veterans community where he lives, and he’s often in the position of talking with them soon after they arrive back in the U.S. from deployment. No matter how they might feel about the “thank-you-for-your-service” meme (because that’s really what it is, it gets passed around almost without thinking in the same way you might forward a funny cat picture), this is the nut of what David told me. When he meets a vet, or a soldier back from deployment, what he says is this: “Welcome home.” They all appreciate that.

Scotland votes for independence in a couple of days. I don’t have any particular dog in this race, or at least, not a big one. Some of my ancestors were Scottish. They came to the Americas before there was a United States to come to. I’ve never been there, and my travels and the years I spent living in Europe were confined to the continent, specifically in the East.

Yet Scotland poses an interesting conundrum, both in what it means for Scotland/the U.K., and what it means for everyone else.

First, the easy answer: everyone else. Slate recently ran a series of stories looking at various sides of What Scottish Independence Means elsewhere, including among other secessionist movements in Europe like the Catalonia-Spain rift and here in the U.S., where we’ve often had populist groups raise their handmade flags for a bit before sheepishly taking them down again once they realized no one was paying much attention.

In the U.S., secession happened once, and it led to the bloodiest conflict in our history. And as a cause for a movement, secession failed utterly. The Civil War did lead to the birth of a nation, but it was a nation in which the ideals of the Declaration and the laws of the Constitution would march in their slow but sure manner toward realization. Before South Carolina threw down the secessionist flag, the country was a hodgepodge of local jurisdictions that mostly did their own thing and ignored what everyone else was doing. After the war, the country was a hodgepodge of local jurisdictions that always had one eye looking over their shoulder to see if Washington wouldn’t object.

The Civil War created the United States as we knew it, and the United States it created was the one based on the Union. The South, the old Confederacy, was gone. Jefferson Davis is a name on statues and highways in a few states, and Robert E. Lee is probably known mostly for his genteel surrender to Ulysses S. Grant than he is for any of his prewar or wartime deeds. Most other “Founding Fathers” of the Confederacy are known only to those who actively study the Confederacy. Which is to say: few people alive today.

Nonetheless, there’s still a bit of the old North-South schism that still lurks under the skin in isolated pockets. Confederate flags were commonplace when I was growing up in Maryland (part of the Confederacy in the war, but now more similar culturally to Massachusetts than nearby Virginia). The Stars and Bars were commonplace when I went to college in North Carolina in the 1980s. Even in the 21st Century someone still trots out that old banner every once in a while, yelling about Southern heritage and how the South will rise again, then screaming political correctness when it’s pointed out that it’s pretty racist to be doing that.

(I’d ask why it is that people who talk about Southern heritage don’t talk about anything other than victimization, or race, or Civil War-era grievances, or why it’s only white conservatives that ever bring it up. It’s not like the South never had any black people.)

But for all the ugliness of this barely-concealed racism among neo-Confederates, the Tea Partiers, even some pretty mainstream Republicans in the South (especially since the nation elected a black man president of the United States) these are really isolated incidents. Yes, there’s a lot of attempting to organize, and there are plenty of wealthy racists willing to make One Last Stand against the long list of things they believe to be Wrong with America that were not so wrong six years ago. The Republicans may even win the Senate this November. But it won’t be because they play the racist card or promote secession, it will be because people are fed up with the Democrats too.

For one thing, demographics have changed even more. As popular as Fox News’ perpetual rage machine is, its core demographic is old. They’re not gone yet, but they’re going. The strategy among southern conservatives seems to be more about gerrymandering the minority vote out of existence before pesky things like demographics put them out to pasture for good.

Because this nation was rebuilt in a new image after the Civil War, and went on to become an industrial powerhouse, emerging as a global superpower in the aftermath of World War II, we can’t go back. We’ve become very mobile. I myself, born into the middle class in the Mid-Atlantic, have lived in the South, in New England, and now in the Pacific Northwest (the latter decision a whim that’s turned into 15 years and something approximating “putting down roots”). Traveling across the country has never been easier (except they keep shrinking airline seats). Most of us know people from other parts of the country, and most of us, whether we are liberal or conservative, religious or not, find that we have a fair amount in common.

We in the Lower 48 are too American to really be secessionist any more. In the 1850s you could make an argument that there was a bigger difference, not just in the institution of slavery, but in fundamental character (the industrializing, mainline Protestant/Catholic North versus the agrarian, evangelical/fundamentalist South). That’s not the case for most people anymore, especially in southern cities, where the influx of capital, education and immigration has turned former backwaters into major metropolises with diverse populations: Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, Atlanta, Houston.

Economics are really a secondary driver of any secessionist movement. Even gung-ho secessionists in Texas (while Gov. Rick Perry’s comments were taken somewhat out of context, a northern governor would never even contemplate that kind of comment, because it’s part of the foundational myth of what makes Texas Texas) would sing a different tune the minute there was an oil bust.

No, secession is about national identity, and the vast majority of us are American first and something else a distant second when it comes to finding our place in the world.

Scottish actor James McAvoy said it best recently: people may be talking about economics in the Scotland vote, but it has to come from the heart. If you get a new country, it’s yours, for better or for worse, and there’s no turning back.

And you need to assume the worst: A crisis will hit the new country, because they always do. You will get an oil bust in Texas (or Scotland), or Cascadia will hit a wheat shortage, or Vermont’s currency will get debased by Wall Street hedge funds, or maybe a larger power will pick on the nascent Free Republic of Whatever. Will they go running back to the Stars and Stripes? Yes.

But if there’s an identity to replace that Americanness they jettisoned — and I don’t see much evidence of that here in the Lower 48 — that might drive the locals to persevere and see their new country through both good times and bad, that will determine if a secessionist movement will stick. Otherwise it’s just politics, and those winds shift every few years even when there isn’t a storm brewing.

The rules are different in Alaska and Hawaii. Alaska likes to talk its independence, but for many reasons (not least the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays people just to live there) it receives more in federal funding than it pays in, so secession is hardly likely there, no matter what the provincial twits in the Palin clan say. Hawai’i, where people of Pacific/Asian extraction are in the majority, is another issue, but it is still a big recipient of federal money, and given Hawai’i’s remoteness and substantial tourist trade driving the state’s economy, the islands are likely to stay in the union for some time.

No, the only real secessionist movement of any significance in North America is the one where there is a significant barrier between regional and national governments, reinforced by different cultures and languages: Québec. As one Québécois friend remarked to me at one time, it’s not a matter of if Québec secedes, it’s when.

So where does this leave Europe if Scotland goes independent? I don’t know. Its a tougher question that I’m comfortable not answering because I simply don’t have the knowledge of the various little movements all over the continent. Of the ones that might be significant, Catalonia has long wanted to break away from Spain, but Madrid is hardly likely to let them go, lest it give the Basques any ideas. Both Cataláns and Basques speak a language other than Spanish, which has helped build their sense of national identity as distinct from that of Spain as a whole. Both groups also suffered under the yoke of the fascist Franco regime from the time of the Spanish Civil War up until 1975, so it’s a little harder for Madrid to say “trust us” when that era is such a recent memory. And, like England, Spain also used to be a global superpower that saw its colonies break away one after another. (Really, someone ought to write a paper about countries suffering from National Post-Superpower Complex.)

Belgium may try to split into Flanders and Wallonia (its government hardly functions as it is, divided largely along the Flemish-French ethnic lines), but it’s hard to see how that will play out in the heart of the European Union.

The real question mark is would be back in the rump United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the latter of which, you may recall, has spent centuries in internecine warfare, with a not-insignificant population who would like nothing more than to break from England once and for all. Because if Scotland can be just let go, why not them as well?

But all these disputes (plus many smaller ones of much less significance) are all happening within the confines of the European Union. The Basque and Northern Ireland conflicts have been violent in the past, but have been largely calm lately. The worry in some quarters is that the Scotland vote, if it succeeds, will encourage a return to that era. “Some quarters” may just mean in the halls of power in London and Madrid, and those fears may not be borne out on the streets. Or maybe they will.

Well, the missiles are not on their way. For one, I’m glad the U.S. and Russia concocted a plan to avoid the attack, and that the result should eventually be a chemical weapon-free Syria.

There are plenty of flies in this particular ointment, a lot of big unknowns that will need to become… well, known knowns for everything to work. Namely:

1. Syria could stall, cheat, do everything in its power to thwart the inspections. This sets the regime up for UN action down the road if it’s particularly egregious, although “UN action” is kind of a misnomer, because Bashar al-Assad could disembowel and consume live kittens on Syrian national television and the Russians would continue to pretend nothing happened. Syria is Russia’s last outpost in the Cold War, and they’ll be damned if they’ll give it up.

2. Assad could just ignore the agreement and continue to gas its own people without a care, leading probably to the airstrikes they think they’ve avoided. Again, Russia will never sign on to it, but Russia never signed on to either of our adventures in Iraq either.

3. Syria could comply, but the war will go on, with the U.S. surreptitiously arming the rebels and Russia the Assad government. Lots of angry speeches will be made.

4. Assad complies, the U.S. keeps to its agreement to not arm the rebels and Russia… still backs the regime. Because Russia.

Still no easy answers. The war’s going to fight itself out, and the only real questions are whether the country still has chemical weapons at the end of it, and whether Assad still sits on his throne.

I’ll just come right out and say it. I don’t think the U.S. should attack Syria, and it looks as though we’re going to. The uproar in the West is over the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons to kill more than a thousand citizens, most of them civilians, in an Aug. 21 attack on several locations in and around Damascus. This was the “red line” that should not be crossed, according to the Obama Administration (actually, Obama’s position is a bit more nuanced than that; left unstated was the possible reactions to crossing the “red line”). But crossed it has been, and therefore we need to send the regime of Bashar al-Assad a message, that is, cruise missiles.

“War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.” So said poet Adrienne Rich (it appears in her essay collection What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics). The sentiment applies in the Syrian Civil War as well, because if nothing else, our entrance into the two-year-old conflict represents nothing so much as the results of setting a rhetorical and moral trap for Assad but ensnaring ourselves. We set the conditions, and Assad called Obama’s bluff.

Now the choices are pretty bleak, so bleak you can’t help but laugh your way through tears of desperation (which makes this situation perfect fodder for The Onion, the funhouse mirror of the early 21st Century that you later realize is perfectly flat). We can send in a few missiles against Assad (the most likely option, which I’ll refer to as the Spanking Option going forward, for all the good it will likely do to prevent Assad from further transgressions against the sensibilities of the West). We can (and may well) increase our shipments of arms to Syrian rebels (and which might prompt an increase of arms shipments to the Syrian government from its Russian allies). We can launch a prolonged and expensive bombing campaign to enforce a no-fly zone, which we can’t really afford, and might also provoke a response from Moscow. We can launch an invasion (see above). Or we can do nothing, and Obama comes away looking weak.

(There’s also the non-option of targeting Assad for assassination, which, in addition to being insanely difficult, is just answering one breach of international conventions with another, and one which is illegal under U.S. executive order since 1976. And it might not change the net outcome of the conflict, since someone else within the Baathist regime will step into Assad’s shoes to continue the war).

(There’s also the added difficulty of trying to remove Assad from power at all. The U.S. doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to creating power vacuums in the Middle East, and among various rebel groups contesting for power in Syria, quite a few are tied to radical Islamic movements that are, shall we say, less than friendly toward U.S. interests.)

The simple, pithy answer was to not get into this in the first place, to not set a “red line” that should not be crossed. In fact, it’s fair to say that the “red line” argument is a direct extension of the Bush Administration’s hyping of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (and Iran and North Korea) as the damn-the-facts justification to pursue war. (The neocon axis of Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Wolfowitz had other misguided ideas about letting 1,000 flowers of democracy bloom in the Middle East so the oil could keep flowing, but W brought his own personal baggage to what was arguably one of the most ill-conceived examples of imperial adventurism since Vietnam.)

Such was Bush’s drumbeat about Iraq’s chemical, biological and “nucular” weapons that there was nothing to do but invade and depose Saddam Hussein in order to prevent him from ever using those nonexistent weapons. This unholy triad of WMD—chemical, biological, nuclear—was the casus belli for a war about other things, but like many bad ideas, they have taken root in debates in power circles as a magical trigger for throwing out all the rulebooks.

This is despite the fact that most WMDs in the world aren’t. It is very difficult to kill large numbers of people with chemical or biological weapons. Both work best in tightly enclosed spaces packed with a large number of people; a stiff breeze or rainshower could severely diminish the effects of gases or biological agents, the explosives in the delivery vehicles could destroy the agents themselves, unfavorable environmental conditions could neutralize the compounds, so using them in anything other than ideal conditions is extremely difficult for anyone without advanced military, chemical and pharmaceutical infrastructure—a national government can do it; a terrorist cell hiding in a cave likely cannot.

If anything, biological weapons are even trickier to deploy effectively, since they depend on contagion vectors and lack of immunity and/or treatment options to do their dirty work. (Nuclear weapons are another matter entirely, but Syria is not a nuclear power, nor was Iraq, nor is any other Middle Eastern nation except Israel, which continues to deny the existence of its arsenal despite reportstothecontrary.)

Don’t get me wrong: chemical weapons are nasty. People exposed to them suffer painful deaths, or if they survive, may be stuck with lifelong debilitating injuries. They should be outlawed. But guns and bombs have the same effects, and we’re generally not talking about disarming the world’s armies or attacking other nations that shoot their own people—this happens all the time, and only once in a great while do we get involved the way we did in the Serbia-Kosovo conflict, to shut down a war with a war of our own.

Be that as it may, it looks like the Spanking Option is the way forward, despite the fact that its purpose has more to do with the U.S. puffing up its chest in the face of a newly resurgent Russia than with solving any on-the-ground problems in Syria. Indeed, the humanitarian crisis in Syria is likely only going to get worse, and Bashar al-Assad is unlikely to change his behavior.

As the writer Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, “Never appeal to a man’s better nature. He might not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.” In this case, Heinlein was prescient. Assad is clearly a monster, but his only interest is remaining in power, and he’s demonstrated he’s willing to do just about anything to do so. Would he be willing to stop his war against his own people if it meant he could stay in power? That could be seen, from Assad’s perspective, as a “mission accomplished” outcome. But President George H.W. Bush once compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler to build support for Operation Desert Shield/Storm, but after Kuwait was liberated, he left Saddam in power, which contributed to Bush’s election defeat in 1992. Would the West be willing to see a similar outcome in Syria, or have we already decided that Bashar al-Assad is the problem that must be eliminated? Instead of saying, by way of comparison, that the Syrian Civil War is the problem? Because those are two distinct problems, and their solutions might not be identical.

This morning I had the realization that sometime in the mid-1990s I fell unknowingly into a trap of sorts, a psychological condition wherein I would go on a more-or-less lifelong quest for The Next Big Thing. At the time, I was living in Boston, was fresh out of graduate school with one of those oh-so-useful MFA degrees that was supposed to be your entry ticket into the literati but was somewhat lacking in the groceries-providing department. I had found temp work, then full-time entry-level work at a company that anticipated the dysfunction on display in “Dilbert” and “The Office.” It was a natural response, once I had secured that job, to want to jettison it for something better, as soon as possible. The Next Big Thing.

That did happen a year or so later, for another company with a slightly smaller level of dysfunction (what’s the quote? “Functional companies are all alike; every dysfunctional company is dysfunctional in its own way”) and before too long, I was in the similar situation of looking for the escape hatch. By that time, however, I had already hatched my plan to find The Next Big Thing.

This focus on what was just around the corner, where the grass was presumably greener, wasn’t limited to employment. There was a time when a former girlfriend and I mused about moving to Pittsburgh primarily because it scored high on those best-places-to-live lists that now come out every couple of months, but back then were somewhat of a novelty. (We didn’t, and it didn’t, although I’m sure Pittsburgh is still a perfectly fine place to live now that the steel industry is both cleaner and smaller. Another city that also ranked high on those lists was Seattle, which truly was about to become The Next Big Thing thanks to a company called Microsoft and a band called Nirvana. Naturally, I arrived in the Pacific Northwest when most of those glory days were past.) Back in high school I’d fallen in love with computer programming, and was considering a career in that Next Big Thing. In that case, my instincts were right, but my math skills were, sad to say, not equal to my level of enthusiasm for the subject. Nor were my acting skills equal to my love of theater, my filmmaking skills to my love of movies, and so on (although on that latter note, I maintain I could have been a pretty good filmmaker from the standpoint of being able to construct a coherent narrative, provided I could obtain the right kind of technical education I wasn’t getting, and didn’t need to wade into the shark tank that is Hollywood to try and play that particular game).

The plan I was hatching in the 1990s, however, was to get out of the country. I’d gone on a rather formative writers’ retreat in the Netherlands, and more than anything else (I didn’t get much writing done there), it opened my eyes to the fact that the world was much larger and more interesting than I’d known, and that furthermore was pretty easy to get out into and explore. I did my research, deciding where I wanted to go (Eastern Europe was rather vibrant at that time), and how I would do it (teaching English), and what vehicle to use to get me there (the Peace Corps; not having any money or means, it offered the best “benefits package” of all the potential gigs: two-year commitment, paid air fare and health care, three months of intense in-country training. It was ideal, and the relatively high standards of their application process was no deterrent).

It worked in the end. My application took 18 months (covering my employment periods at both dysfunctional companies), having been delayed by a sudden outbreak of plantar warts, but by mid-1995 I was on the plane to Hungary with 51 fellow Americans, mostly young, mostly idealistic, whose own reasons for joining might have been similar to mine. Or not. I don’t know.

I was not teacher material, at least not high school English teacher material. I tried to do a good job, I think in some cases I did, but I didn’t have the patience and finely honed diplomacy skills necessary to deal with the students who weren’t interested in being there. The next plan was journalism. Always a news junkie, while I was living in a small Hungarian village I came to rely on whatever media I could consume from the outside world: month-old issues of Newsweek from the Peace Corps office (useful for the pictures I’d cut out for lesson planning), copies of the International Herald Tribune, The Economist and a little rag called Budapest Week when I could get up to the capital on the weekend, and a late night mix of Hungarian TV news (I could mostly understand the weather report) and tabloid-style German TV.

Post-Peace Corps, the goal was to move to Budapest to become an International Journalist. Which kinda-sorta happened at the aforementioned rag, but never to the extent that I’d envisioned because at the time, with the Bosnian Civil War wrapped up a year prior, the Kosovo War a few years off still, and the wider world’s interest turning to places other than a tiny European country with a fragile democracy, the local market for International Journalists was looking rather thin. There were journalists working for the big wire services in Budapest, and I knew all those guys. They weren’t going anywhere soon. So if I wanted to continue in this vein, I figured I’d have to return home. Which, after a couple years of doing freelance pieces for Budapest Week and teaching something called “business English” at a private language school, and after I married my Hungarian girlfriend and helped secure the necessary immigration paperwork, I did.

Seattle was never the goal, only a means to an end. In 1999, there were three daily papers here, plus two alt-weeklies, a whole nest of community papers (at least one for every neighborhood in a very neighborhood-centric city), and the city seemed to have some traction in this new thing called the Internet. Regardless of the fact that web pages were primitive, that only one of the three dailies had a functional website to speak of (and its “news,” I realized upon arriving in Seattle, was not reflective of day-to-day life in the city, but that’s another story…) I got a job at the smallest of the dailies, and then, for the next seven years, had what was probably the best low-paying job working for morons one could ever have.

Which isn’t to say my immediate supervisors were bad. Most were quite good, smart, funny, dedicated people with drive and ambition to comprehensively chronicle the day-to-day life of our coverage area. The morons were higher up the chain, Peter Principles rendered in real life, whose management skills were evidenced by a steadily decreasing circulation, a buzzword-laden afterthought of an online strategy, and an ignominious end with the paper sold off and shut down. But again, another story.

Being a newspaper reporter is probably the best job someone of my disposition could have. A former editor of mine there once remarked that it’s a job that skews toward people who are poor at planning. As someone who came in from the cold, so to speak, with no direct newsgathering experience but a lot of drive, there was a Next Big Thing waiting for me in the office every day. One day I was greeted by a car chase through a local park, one day a convoluted dispute over soccer fields, one day a couple of planes hitting buildings on the other side of the country, an event which to this day still rattles me when I think about the moment I walked into the newsroom after the drive in (listening to an all-music station, and after I’d broken my usual morning habit of surfing news websites in favor of writing a song about a dream I’d had the night before) and being told by an editor that we were under attack.

Since those years, I’ve never experienced the same feeling as the rush of adrenaline that seems to originate from the thin air of a crowded newsroom when suddenly everything turns and heads in a completely different direction, a pack of hounds hot on the hunt for the fox we’d just caught scent of. My newspaper career ended not because of any one thing that happened, but rather a series of events and decisions that made it abundantly clear that it was, once again, time to find the escape pods. I moved over into magazine writing about four months before that paper folded, but since then I’ve gone on to doing more freelance work, and most recently a contract gig at a large technology enterprise that came to its end a couple weeks ago.

What’s the Next Big Thing? It’s possible that I’ve already been on it. I’ve been working on a novel for about the last seven years (I may have started it after I left the newspaper gig, maybe before, I no longer remember), and I’m not going to say anything more about it here (maybe later), but being suddenly given a lot more free time (plus what most people refer to as unemployment insurance but what I like to think of as the real National Endowment for the Arts), I at least have this project to fall back on until something comes along that will once again make me seem like a productive member of larger society. I’ve tried novel writing twice before, once in grad school and once while living in a small Hungarian village with a lot of time on my hands, and in both cases the projects were abandoned when it became apparent that they suffered from a lack of structure, character development or even an interesting plot. This time I hope it’s different, and as I’ve already completed one draft and have a plan for the next, I’d like to think so.

In the meantime, while I’ve been out chasing the Next Big Thing, my family, friends and colleagues have been doing theirs. But I think most of them would simply refer to it as Life: pursuing careers (or just gainful employment; it seems we’ve become a society that insists your job be worthy of an autobiography, whereas it should be fine to just work for the paycheck), getting married, having children (a Very Big Thing for most people), growing older, dying.

I picked up on this obsession of mine with Next Big Things this morning, I believe, because some news of national import happened yesterday which, on the face of it, doesn’t affect me in any real sense other than to make me depressed about the future of this country, and triggering an old instinctive response: is it time to head for the lifeboats? I think my answer this time is no. It may be that I’ve matured (yeah, right), or simply that I’ve got enough of a Next Big Thing to keep me busy in the form of this current project. When I was in my twenties it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing, when things in the home country weren’t going so well, to pack up and head off to foreign parts in pursuit of whatever utopia or distraction or Next Big Thing lay in waiting. To that extent, the European/Australian practice of a gap year seems to be a good way for the young ones to let off some of that steam, and their societies’ tolerance of such youthful perambulation (the modern-day “Grand Tour” of dive bars, beach parties and raves across Europe) may work out to everyone’s longer term benefit.

But as we like to say, there comes a time to settle down. Or, at least, to approximate the appearance of settling down while quietly pursuing the Next Big Thing.

Scottish author Iain Banks has died at the age of 59 after a short battle with gall bladder cancer. He made a splash with his debut novel, The Wasp Factory, and continued to draw praise for his gritty realism. But he also found a second audience with his science fiction novels, written as Iain M. Banks. In these, starting with Consider Phlebas, he wrote unapologetic space opera, mostly in a far-future post-scarcity society called The Culture which dealt with human tragedy against a background of artificial intelligence, war and espionage.

Banks’ most recent book is the science fiction novel The Hydrogen Sonata, but his final work, a mainstream novel called The Quarry, is due out this month. When he announced his terminal illness April 3 on his website, he said he’d hoped to live long enough to see it in print. Sadly, he did not.

“I want to thank every American who participated in this election … whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time. By the way, we have to fix that.” —President Barack Obama

Now that the election is behind us and we can look forward to another four years of our Kenyan Muslim Socialist Overlord, the temptation is to try to forget those last unpleasant 18 months and move on with our lives, either stepping a bit more lightly if the election went our way, or trying our best to muddle along if it didn’t.

But there’s a bit of unpleasantness we still need to deal with, unless we don’t want to see a repeat of it every two years from now until the end of time (or the Mayan apocalypse, whichever comes first). President Obama hinted at it in his victory speech above, almost as an afterthought, although I’d put money on it being rather front-of-mind for him right now.

It should be. Pundits galore are talking about how right now Obama needs to do this or that: create more jobs, cut the deficit, cut the debt, reform immigration, cut taxes, repair our infrastructure, get back to New Jersey and New York to rebuild.

Aside from that last one (because people still don’t have power, water, food or fuel), all those other issues, while each is important in its own way, cannot be solved without fixing the big one.

Our democracy is broken. (For those who say, “We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a republic, and shouldn’t change,” I say, “Well, you’re part of the problem.”)

It’s not just that there were long lines at the polls. It’s not just that some ballots will inevitably be miscounted. It’s not that voting machine software can be buggy.

It’s all of these things.

It’s that the people who run our elections have an interest in exploiting these problems, and creating them.

And it’s because we, the people, can do nothing about it but shout into the wind of the internet.

(For those who say, “Where’s the Democratic fraud?” I say, “Show me the evidence.” And I don’t mean WorldNutDaily or Fox News reports. Fox doesn’t report news, they report fantasy, and that’s never been more on display than last night. Yes, Talking Points Memo is partisan, but they practice journalism while clearly letting you know if they like or dislike what they’re reporting. They report the news as it is, not as they’d want it to be. The fact that their polling estimates were correct and Fox’s were wrong? Case in point. It’s easier to be right when you live and work in the reality-based community.)

By the way, all of these incidents were happening in swing states. What do you think is happening in “safe” districts where no one is watching the polls? Everything runs smoothly when we don’t have election monitors, iPhone cameras, or reporters hanging around? I doubt it.

So, what’s the answer, smartass?

This: It’s time to reform our electoral system, from the ground up. And there are two key components of this.

First: Nationalize the federal elections. Candidates for federal office need to be held to the same standards across the country. The election laws for federal office need to be the same in each of the 50 United States (and D.C. and any other taxed-without-representation territory that sends people to Washington to do the people’s business). And while we’re at it, the federal elections must be run by an independent nonpartisan body, not elected politicians or partisan appointees. Independents: Professional managers who will not see the office as a stepping stone to a political career.

Canada already does this, as do other modern democracies. Why must our race for the presidency be a contest of 50 different votes, each with its own quirks and idiosyncratic laws, so we get hanging chads here, buggy voting machines there, optical scanners here and voice votes there? We Americans love our traditions, but the composition of our federal offices is too important to be left under the auspices of, quite frankly, local yahoos with an agenda. We simply can’t trust them to do their job fairly. Let’s talk about the Florida recount of 2000, the evidence of vote stealing in Ohio in 2004, or yes, dead people voting in Chicago in 1960. Saying, “But Kennedy did it too” doesn’t excuse it, and it doesn’t excuse allowing such a backward, third world banana republic system to continue in the richest and most powerful country in the world.

The second part of the solution is transparency. Naomi Wolf has the right idea here. It’s simple, really. You cast your vote, you get a physical receipt with a unique number. You can then look up that number on the website of the official elections authority (whatever it is) and see, not just that your vote was counted, but that each vote for each candidate or ballot measure was recorded accurately. And what’s more, you can see all the votes, and count them yourself, to see that they add up.

No one knows how you voted except you. Everyone else just sees a bunch of numbers and the individual votes. If you’re that concerned about privacy even then, you can burn your receipt and no one will ever find out. (It’ll make it hard to validate your vote later if you forget your number, however.) Votes will no longer go into a black box, to be tallied by mysterious gnomes in an undisclosed location, and then disappear.

Where I live and vote, Seattle, we are already on the right track. I cast my ballot, and later, I go to the King County Department of Elections’ Ballot Tracker and look it up, and it confirms that my vote was counted. It doesn’t tell me that my votes were counted correctly, and I don’t have any way of finding this out. I have to trust the government. As Ronald Reagan once said, “Trust. But verify.” I’m fairly confident that Seattle is going in this direction, maybe even by the next presidential election.

But there’s no reason why the rest of the country shouldn’t follow suit.

Actually, there is. It’s because our election system is a decentralized hodgepodge of obsolete laws and partisan elected officials whose first thought is to try and wrest any advantage for their team. A broken and corruptible election system works just fine for them. It’s just we, the people, who get screwed. That’s why it needs to be nationalized.

After today, I hope that putting in place reforms—real significant reforms—will be top-of-mind during Obama’s second term, especially since he no longer has to run for office and can afford to take the high road. Congress will be trickier and will probably balk at coming around, but that’s where Obama needs to use his bully pulpit, his momentum and, yes, his mandate, to guide the future of American democracy. We simply can’t afford anything less.

There are two other issues at stake as well, but they are, I think, of slightly lesser importance.

One is the Electoral College. While watching the returns Tuesday evening, I was struck by how much of the minute-by-minute analysis on CNN was focused not just on the swing states, but on counties and precincts. Lake County, Ohio. Nashua, New Hampshire. Prince William County, Virginia. Araphoe and Jefferson Counties, Colorado. One the one hand this is the media’s late acknowledgement of the reality that political handicappers and consultants have known for years: that the battle for the White House will be lost or won in the outer suburban counties of certain cities in certain states. If you didn’t live in one of those counties, your vote didn’t matter. Well, it mattered, but it mattered a lot less than the votes of those people who do live in those counties. One vote in Broward County, Florida carries more weight than ten votes in King County, Washington. That’s not how a democracy should run. The Electoral College should go, along with its antiquated arithmetic of selecting the most powerful person on the planet.

The other is money. Citizens United pulled out all the stops of unregulated campaign cash, and this year it’s estimated that $2 billion was spent by the Obama and Romney campaigns. That’s just the presidential race. There were also the Senate, House and state governorships, tallying who knows how much more. Coupled with the power of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., is it any wonder we see our Congress as the best that money can buy, or that our election system is more about choosing which wealthy representative of the business world will lead us, rather than a real democracy? Suffice to say, that $2 billion could have been put to better use than television advertisements.

For these latter two issues, this goes to the heart of the Constitution, and either would take an Amendment to get into place, or in the very least, a radical shakeup of the Supreme Court that would willingly overturn Citizens United or go after the Electoral College. That might be rather unthinkable right now, but if we can fix our elections system as above—standardizing it and making it transparent—we might just find that other reforms such as the latter two might come a bit easier.

We might just find that governing in general might become a bit easier, as well, and that, no matter your political stripe, should be seen as a good thing.

Here’s the way I see tonight’s election. It’s not quite Obama’s to lose. I think he’ll win, and win decisively (winning both the electoral college and the popular vote), and it’s certainly what I want to see happen, but it’s not a done deal, and there is a road to the White House for Romney. This is what I think is Romney’s best chance, and then I’ll take a guess as to what will happen. (It’s a guess, not a prediction. I’m not Nate Silver.)

Of the polls I’ve been watching (TPM is following a bunch of them), there are only three states that could be considered a tossup, with the margin of victory under 2 percent for either candidate: Florida, Virginia, North Carolina. There aren’t any states that could be considered “lean Romney” right now. Those states he has in his column he has with a polling share of more than 5 percent. What he has adds up to 191 electoral votes (which I think will be unlikely to swing to Obama). If we assume Romney snags all three tossups, that gives him 248. So to win, Romney will need to peel away at least two of the “lean Obama” states, where the president is polling favorably by 2-5 percent. Those states, in decreasing order of electoral clout: Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Colorado (9), Iowa (6), Nevada (6), and New Hampshire (4). Even with Pennsylvania or Ohio in his column, he needs another one to push him up to 270.

Romney could do it, conceivably. I think the most realistic road to the White House would be Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa. But, as they say, it’s an uphill road in both directions. For one, peeling away Ohio and Iowa is going to be tough. For another, Virginia isn’t a done deal by any means. The state that once ran Oliver North for the Senate also elected Tim Kaine governor. The more recent trend has been a shift from the Bible Belt/Old Confederacy Richmond-to-Lynchburg axis to a consolidation of power in the greater D.C. area. Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax weigh very heavily in the state, and they lean blue. Off the three tossups, Virginia is going to give Romney the most trouble.

If it does? Assuming he takes N.C. and Florida (I think he will), he’ll need Ohio (or Pennsylvania—but I don’t think he can take Pennsylvania: its urban centers are too big and too East Coast), Iowa, Colorado and one other lean Obama state, either Nevada or New Hampshire. A long shot either way if he loses Virginia. Same situation if he somehow loses North Carolina (N.C. went blue in 2008, so it could happen).

If Florida swings for Obama, Romney needs both Pennsylvania and Ohio to win, and at least two more in the “lean Obama” column.

Where does that leave us? If all the “lean Obama” states turn out for Obama, Obama wins. Romney’s needs to do some serious chipping away in those states to pull out a victory.

Here’s my guess for the night: “lean Obama” states—Pennsylvania, Ohio (because of the auto bailout/strong union support), Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire—go for Obama. So does Virginia. Romney takes North Carolina and Florida. There may be some monkey business up in Maine, which could split off one of its four electoral votes to the Romney camp or an independent candidate, but it doesn’t change the math. Nebraska won’t split its vote (Bob Kerry’s getting creamed in the senate race, and he’s Obama’s biggest bellwether in the state).

I no longer have that essay lying around (the book was in one of several boxes I donated some years ago to create space in my small apartment), so I can’t consult it for this little amateur post on temporal physics. But Niven was getting at all those paradoxes that you need to deal with when you go back in time and kill your parents before you were born and all that fun stuff. But let’s skip the paradoxes and, just for shits and giggles, consider time in the Einsteinian sense, being a dimension just like the other three spatial dimensions.

There’s some heavy math involved here, which is beyond my capabilities. So feel free to disprove or work out the equations on your own; I won’t be upset. What if, as they say, time is a river, and we’re caught up in its flow. Well, as someone who spent a considerable period of my youth on a river (the Shenandoah; “life is old, there, older than the trees”), paddling both upstream and downstream, you can see that the metaphor falls apart, since we can’t paddle upstream through time (i.e., go into the past). We only go into the future, at a constant rate of one second per second.

But what if the metaphor does hold? Paddling upstream requires significantly more energy than paddling downstream. In fact, paddling downstream requires almost no energy at all other than that which is exerted to raise the beer can to your mouth or swat away the mosquitoes. If I were to get up from my chair and walk across the room I’m in, I would be exerting energy to move through three spatial dimensions.

Math question: How much energy E must be spent to move a body of mass M a certain distance along the X, Y and Z axes of this room?

Whatever E is, suffice to say that I have the ability to generate that amount of energy, even if the variables change from time to time, such as M increasing by 20 pounds over the last couple years, and therefore so does E to compensate.

But if there’s one thing that Einstein taught us, is that all motion is contextual. While it may seem that the E figure isn’t much, that it’s not too difficult to navigate this room, what I’m actually doing is changing my body’s (M) vector of motion, relative to everything else around me that is moving. So while change that I made, moving across the room, may be significant in that I can now reach my drink, or the cat can now move into the chair I vacated, compared with the motion of the Earth’s rotation I’ve hardly moved at all. Why? The Earth rotates at a certain speed. Where I am physically located (Seattle, 47.606 degrees north latitude), that speed comes to (break out the calculator here– cosine(latitude) x 1,000 m.p.h., which is the approximate speed of rotation at the equator) 674 m.p.h. and change. There 3,600 seconds in an hour. In 3 seconds, I am able to navigate about 8 feet across a cluttered den, but in those 3 seconds, the Earth has rotated (i.e., my position on the surface of the planet relative to the space above the Earth) 988.5 feet. It wasn’t my energy that caused me to actually move 988.5 feet in one direction. My energy was spent moving 8 feet in another — specifically, west, which is opposite the direction that the Earth rotates. To have only moved eight feet west relative to the Earth’s rotation, I would somehow have to move 996.5 feet west relative to this room. In 3 seconds.

Even discarding the amount of energy required to go through several layers of concrete wall in multiple buildings and up a slight rise so I don’t wind up underground, we’re talking about an enormous amount of energy, more than my humble body has the ability to generate.

Math question 2: Just how much energy would be needed if we needed to correct not just for the rotation of the Earth, but the movement of the Earth around the sun?

The Earth moves around the Sun at 66,000 miles per hour. Meanwhile, the Sun and all its planets are moving through the Milky Way galaxy at about 43,000 miles per hour (in yet another direciton, toward the star Vega). What is more, the entire galaxy is rotating, much like the Earth does, but at a relative speed (given our position out on one of the galactic arms) of 483,000 miles per hour, adding yet another vector on top of the others. And the Milky Way itself is not stationary: it is moving through our universe… at what rate? Well, as they say, everything is relative. All galaxies, star clusters, gas clouds are moving through the universe. The only frame of reference we possibly have comes from the Big Bang theory, which puts out that not only did the universe get born in a big bang some 13-14 billion years ago, but that it’s been expanding ever since, at a rate that is somewhat less than the speed of light (because according to Einstein, nothing with mass can exceed the speed of light), but that means that the universe is probably some 13-14 billion light-years across, which comes to something above (lessee, trillion miles times 13 billion is…) 76.7 quadrillion miles.

And measured against the Cosmic Background Radiation, which is as close to a frame of reference to the initial Big Bang there is, the Milky Way is moving through the universe at 1.3 million miles per hour (in the direction represented by the constellations Leo and Virgo; which is different from the star Vega in the constellation Lyra). Calculate that downward to our room: In the 3 seconds it took me across the room, the galaxy moved 1,083 miles. In that context, 8 feet is nothing on a cosmic scale, and there’s no way I, you, or anyone else on this planet, can counteract all those different vectors without expending an enormous amount of energy.

If, as Einstein says, time is simply another dimension like our three spatial dimension, and that all objects in the universe can be expressed by their motion through those three dimensions plus time, why is it that we only experience time going forward? Why is time so special?

Well, the answer is time is not special. We perceive its movement as we perceive the wind in our face when we ride in a car with the windows open. We are traveling through time, at one second per second. In order to, in the science fictional sense, travel through time, we need to expend enough energy to change our vector relative to the one second-per-second vector we are currently traveling on.

Math question 3: How much energy is needed to change that vector?

I’m not even going to attempt to Google an answer to that question. Moving across the room requires a measurable if small amount of energy, but actually moving relative to the motions of the Earth, solar system and galaxy requires quite a significant amount more. So much more that, so far, our only attempts have been limited to strapping ourselves on the tops of powerful rockets, which are pointed upward just so we can escape Earth’s gravity. Changing all those other vectors to reach an absolute standstill relative to the universe is beyond us, much less to reverse those vectors, or manipulate those vectors. And we haven’t even started in about how to counteract or otherwise alter the motion of us, the Earth, the solar system and the galaxy through the universe in the time dimension.

So the reason we can’t travel through time? Perhaps it’s only a question of energy. In other words, we haven’t tried hard enough. Because one-second-per-second, as it turns out, is very, very fast.

Again, I’m a dilettante when it comes to this stuff. Someone with more letters after their name can punch holes through all my musing on this subject.

One final thought: Returning to Einstein, we find that space-time (all four dimensions) can be changed and distorted by gravity as well as motion. That’s why if you in your spaceship got close to a very massive body, such as a black hole, and survive such an encounter (i.e., you didn’t actually cross the event horizon and disappear forever, or get torn apart by the tidal forces the curvature of space-time exerts on your body, or get fried down to your atoms by the radiation in the area of the black hole), you would find that your position in time as well as space would likely have changed, because the mass of the black hole is enough to distort all four dimensions to a point that you might not actually move through its field at a rate of one second per second. You might actually be moving faster, relative to the rest of us. Meaning, that while you spend what you think is a few minutes playing around dangerous black holes, for the rest of us, hours, days, months or years might have passed, depending on how close you got and how long you got there.

As far as time travel goes, extreme levels of gravity provide one way of doing so, the only way that’s permissible under the laws of physics as we know them. But that’s not a way of generating the energy required above as it is distorting the time dimension so much that we actually perceive the distortion as different from where we are. But even then, that seems to only account for time going in one direction. Perhaps in the arcane mathematics of negative energy or dark matter or quantum physics or whatever is something that would explain how time could be distorted in the other direction. If it’s out there, it’s sure to be weird.

But perhaps the best way of looking at it is this is this quote, also from Einstein: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” Maybe he was not just creating a pithy example (for a 1938 scientific paper) but was really figuring out an easier way to travel through time. He certainly tested his theory a lot.

Of course, it’s steampunk that’s bringing me back for my second post in as many years. Not that I’m a huge fan of the genre. I am writing what I hope turns out to be my first published/-able novel, which I think I’m describing as a “comic-historical-adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones meets Code of the Woosters.” Not very steampunky at all, as it’s set in the 20-21st centuries on the one hand and the sixth on the other.

But what sets me off about it is a happy coincidence of several events:

1. I’m finally reading Perdido Street Station.
2. The SyFy channel is airing a new, somewhat interesting new show, Warehouse 13.
3. A friend is planning a Halloween party on the theme of “archaeologists vs. mummies,” and I’m determined to come as Sir Henry Morton Stanley (he of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame). I need a pith helmet and convincing handlebar mustache.
4. I like brass.

Note that no. 4 above is not so much an “event” as it is a realization that there is a strong aesthetic appeal in a material so hard and shiny, yet also warm and inviting. And outside of the steampunk milieu, it is almost unseen in modern design and architecture.

China Miéville’s seminal novel got me thinking about cities and their design, as the book is set in the decrepit metropolis of New Crobuzon, set on the planet of Bas Lag, a place where alien races, Victorian-era technology, some kinds of magical forces (although more as background powers to be researched and tapped, rather than the skill-based combat magic systems that populate most swords-and-sorcery fiction these days.)

New Crobuzon is probably one of the best fictional cities I’ve ever read about, whether in fantastic fiction or in the mainstream. It ranks up there with the very real metropolises in the real world that seem to have tapped their inner chaos and come to life on their own, Istanbul being one of my favorites. As an example of sprawl, decomposition, pollution, corruption and general unpleasantness, New Crobuzon is a bit over the top, perhaps, but coupled with a darn good story, it stands out. It makes me want to read his new one, The City and the City, which takes as its inspiration two very different cities, perhaps analogous to Prague and, yes, Istanbul. (I suspect a kindred spirit here).

The new SyFy (née SciFi) series Warehouse 13 (not to be confused with Warehouse 23, which, if you know anything at all about it, makes you an irredeemable geek for life) isn’t near as deep, but it’s a fun romp through X-Files¬-style mysteries of the occult, alien, obscure artifacts and relics stored in a vast government warehouse in South Dakota because… well, let’s say if you have the Ark of the Covenant, and can’t figure out what to do with it without causing unleashing its face-melting bad-assery on the local population, wouldn’t you want to put it away somewhere to make sure no-one else gets to it?

The storylines are fairly simple: two federal agents investigate weird and paranormal events, primarily to find whatever mysterious object is behind the events, to then retrieve said object and return it safely to the warehouse where it will presumably do no more harm. The steampunk elements come into play in the design of the warehouse and some of the tools the characters use: two-way video communicators that look like brass cigarette cases with a magnifying lens stuck in them (why they aren’t using iPhones with Skype, I don’t know), the warehouse administrator Artie’s machine-tooled brass PC, probably modeled on the very real “Steampunk Keyboard” mod that made the rounds on the net a year or two ago, and various other little design elements that make the sets look just plain cool.

Thus steampunk creeps ever further into the mainstream, with more and more authors delving into the Victorian era (less a steampunk offshoot than a renewed interest in the 19th century romance as a form of art). Can we expect a remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (the Disney movie, not the book) sometime soon? Hold on, I’ll check the internets… yes. And just in time for a steampunk renaissance to hit us full blast around mid-2010, maybe.

Is that a prediction? Maybe. I’m new at this, so the crystal ball isn’t so clear. But, as a former editor of mine once put it, I detect a trend.

Back to the original thought: what is appealing? The 2008 New York Times article I originally linked to (in danger of disappearing behind a pay wall any day now, or never, depending on how panicky the newspaper industry gets) treated steampunk as a design movement rather than a literary genre, but cited a source or two talking about a desire to connect with a world where quality workmanship drove technological innovation, and to get out of the current one of mass-produced consumer products, whether it’s crappy computers running a crappy operating system or those gol-darned kids and their backwards baseball caps and their shorts pulled down to their knees.

It is true that refinement is a concept notably lacking in modern life (except when it comes to petroleum), but to romanticize the Victorians is a little bit silly via vaccinated time travel, and a little bit disingenuous, because who wouldn’t want to live in Victorian England, say, so long as you could be 1) immune to smallpox, 2) located far away from nasty coal-fired factories, and 3) a lady or gentleman of society. There were plenty of pox-ridden peasants and miners with black lung around then, but those aren’t the people we want to remember from the era. They didn’t have neat brass fittings in their houses. They didn’t wear nice clothes.

Class is indeed at the heart of the steampunk ethos, as it was at the heart of the conflicts of the Industrial Revolution (the second one, especially) as labor grew to become more and more exploited by industry and led to the rise of the union movement. For that, the literature and aesthetics are less Victorian/steampunk as they are A Hazard of New Fortunes. The upper class had their vices. They drank, screwed, farted with the rest of humanity. But they created for themselves a conceit that they never experienced such banal reminders of being alive, simply by virtue of their station. They could probably be understood as the first (and not last) modern sufferers of a mass denial of their own humanity.

Which is why Perdido Street Station stands out. It delves into the underclass with relish, rolling in the filth that clogs the sewers of New Crobuzon, lovingly detailing its characters’ malformations and injuries (at one point in the book, most of the main characters lose an ear), and never flinching from a landscape scarred and blighted by industry, chemistry, magic and science run amok. Rather than polished brass, devices are cobbled together out of whatever scrap is handy. Metal rusts. Brick crumbles. Pipes corrode and foul liquids spew forth. Everything smells. Such is life, and that’s why China Miéville’s New Crobuzon is more real a city than many others.

And New Crobuzon reflects more accurately the cities of this world. Many places I’ve lived and traveled in share elements, whether it’s the crumbling infrastructure visible in any modern American city (Seattle’s and Boston’s collapsing roadways come to mind, as does the New York metropolitan power grid), the exposed pipes, wires and supports of Budapest where the masonry still shows the scars of the 1956 uprising, to the urban chaos of Istanbul, the nightmare industrial zone of Copsa Mica (Romania), industrial accidents on the Tisza River (Hungary), plus countless places in Russia, China, Ukraine and elsewhere, where I’ve only seen photos or read reports. This is the real world that Perdido Street Station draws from. Shiny brass and intricate workmanship can probably be found in many of those places, but it is still just one fragment of the whole, living, breathing city.

Despite this, I still like brass. More thoughts on this later. Perhaps next year.